All living things take a toll on their environment. For humans, we build roads and cities, we farm our food and animal products. For animals living naturally in the wild, one of the biggest impacts to their surrounding environment is their diet. We propose that birds, given their propensity for omnivorous and herbivorous diets, and lower basal metabolic rates, will have less of an environmental impact based on this scale. It has long been held that the lower one consumes on the food chain, the less the environmental impact is. One study found that carnivorous diets were associated with significantly greater greenhouse gas emission rates (Gonzalez et al., 2016). Using this standard, we can assess, in a general sense, the environmental impact of dietary preferences in birds and mammals. By gaging and scoring carnivore, omnivore, and herbivore diets across both birds and mammals, and comparing it to Basal metabolic rate, we can see a trend in the environmental impact of birds and mammals.
